Since I have a reputation for talking about reputations.... You are already engaged in a positive reputation system. Which email lists are you on? Which newsGroups do you bother with? what TV shows do you watch? New instances of all of these pop up and succeed all the time. Negative reputation systems work very poorly. Right now I receive cypherpunks. I used to receive Extropians (and will do so again soon). The volume can get horrific at times. Consider all the stuff that I'm not receiving (that I filtered out). I don't see sci.nanotech, sci.crypt, alt.pgp (?), libernet, alt.politics, alt.sex.bondage, etc. because I haven't the bandwidth. Ah, but if I could pick and choose among the entire available feed rather than ignoring most of it just so I have a hope of filtering down to a manageable mail load.... That's what positive filters are for. There are lots of gems buried in the crap of net-news (and remember that my gems may be your crap), and I want a system that will find them for me. I think the approach of reputation filtered mailing lists is a bad one. That reputation filtering process is simply a poor mechanism to avail us all of the moderator's taste in email. If we had a better mechanism, then such a list is just alt.extropy or sci.crypt where things are prioritized (using the positive prioritixing information of such people who would otherwise be moderators) such that I see the good stuff and ignore the bozoz (whomever they are). Or in the more likely case, I just see the creme de la creme of the good stuff because that's all I have time for. In such a system, one can think of a magazine as simply purchasing the editor's priority information. Paul Baclace built a genetic algorithm thing that would present netnews from all groups in prioritized order. As you gave it feedback on how glad you were to receive each message, it didi pattern matching on features of the messages to make better sorters. This ends up correlating author (anonymous or otherwise), subjet, topic, reply chain, time of day, whatever seems relevant into the prioritization of mail. If those weight could be spread, combined with manually entered filters ("I'm tired of politics..."), etc. you might actually be able to spend less time on email/news getting more value from it. dean